Statistics on download files and automatic downloads from other sites

[Sébastien Heymann]

Hi,

The statistics on file downloads from the Gephi project (https://launchpad.net/gephi/+download) are suspicious since they are directly referred by other websites like http://www.brothersoft.com/download-gephi-440699.html

In our case, we distribute a software for 3 platforms. Only the one for Windows is externally referred, and has a count value really much higher compared to the number of downloads counted on these sites.

So I wonder if a website, using a script to ping / automatically download the file, would increase the download counter? These sites may ping each day to ensure the link is not broken. This could be a serious bias in the statistics, as one expect to count only the "human" downloads.